1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to collaboration systems and, more particularly, to contact initialization based upon automatic profile sharing between computing devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
In any crowd or gathering of people commonalities exist. These commonalities can include shared hobbies, interest, business dealings, friends, relatives, and the like. These people are largely unaware of the commonalities, which results in many missed opportunities for business and interpersonal relationships. The problem is one of recognizing potential contact situations and interpersonal opportunities and initializing contact to explore these opportunities.
For example, a person can be waiting in an airport for a flight. A nearby person, who is also waiting for the flight, can be an existing customer of a company for which the first person works. The first and second person can also share an interest in a sports team, which is about to play a game, which is televised at an airport café. If both people knew of their commonalities, both people may want to introduce each other and watch the game together at the café. Most likely, however, the opportunity to watch the game together and potentially establish groundwork for future business relations would be missed due to a lack of knowledge of the shared commonalities.
What is needed is a technology/methodology by which people can increase their environmental awareness so that they can be made aware of commonalities with nearby individuals. No known tool exists to automatically detect commonalities with nearby peoples, to alert people of these commonalities, and to facilitate contact based upon these commonalities.